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Since the interaction with immersive visualizations can be crucial to finding the desired information, this work seeks to explore the possibilities of improving this kind of interaction by providing tangible touch points in the form of drones. Not only is the tracking of the drones a vital aspect but also the finding of meaningful behavior that is applied to the drone after it has been touched and manipulated, is at the core of this work. After a prototype model has been found for interaction and drone response it will be tested and evaluated on various immersive visualizations by conducting a user study that is centered around the ease and amount of gaining of information.

Tasks:

• Literature research concerning tangible interaction with virtual reality visualizations especially focused on drone-interaction.
• Setting up and tracking a drone to act as a tangible point.
• Conducting of an evaluative user study integrating various visualizations.

Requirements:

• Basics in Unity 3D (C#) and 3D modeling.
• Interest in tangible VR-interaction.
• Plus: experience with three dimensional interaction concepts.

Details

Effizienz ist ein wichtiger Faktor der Usabilityforschung. Im Allgemeinen beschreibt die Effizienz eines Systems den Aufwand, welchen ein Nutzer erbringen muss, um eine bestimmte Aufgabe zu erfüllen. Effizienz wird meist in Zeit gemessen und evaluiert.

Die wissensbasierte Authentifizierung (bspw. PIN) stellt ein Beispiel für eine solche Aufgabe dar. Als Maß der Effizienz dient hier in der Regel die Zeit, welche für die korrekte Eingabe eines Passwortes/PIN benötigt wird. Neue Erkenntnisse deuten jedoch darauf hin, dass es neben der aktiven Eingabe weitere Phasen gibt, welche sowohl die gemessene als auch die gefühlte Effizienz des Mechanismus beeinflussen. Dabei ist neben der reinen Existenz dieser Phasen auch das Verhältnis der Phasen zueinander maßgebend für die User Experience.

In diesem Einzelpraktikum soll der Einfluss der verschiedenen Authentifizierungsphasen auf die Effizienz untersucht werden. Dafür sollen mehrere Modifikationen eines PIN-Eingabesystems entwickelt und im Feldtest studiert werden.

Aufgaben:

1. Literaturrecherche / selbstständiges Aneignen von Fachwissen
2. Ausarbeitung der zu testenden Konzepte (im Team)
3. Entwicklung der Studiensoftware (Android oder iOS)
4. Planung und Durchführung der Nutzerstudie (im Team)
5. Analyse und Aufbereitung der Studienergebnisse

Bei Erfolg des Projektes besteht die Möglichkeit an einer internationalen Publikation mitzuwirken.

Details

The benefits of hexagons have been widely used in information visualization. They can be used not only for dividing spatial areas into clear even grids but also for representing given polygons such as geographic administration units in order to eliminate differences in size and shape that could distort the impression of a visualization. In the latter use case the arrangement of hexagons is often modeled by hand. This work seeks to find an efficient algorithmic method that creates an optimal hexagonal grid out of any set of polygons while respecting original neighborhood, location and shape of the polygonal outline as much as possible, while evaluating if this can be done fully automatic or at what degree manual correction can be necessary. In conclusion the algorithm shall be tested by creating a 3d-visualization of a spatial polygon grid that is usable for immersive visualization.

Tasks:

• Literature research including space-filling visualization techniques.
• Modeling of the algorithm by extending and evaluating previous work on the topic.
• Implementation and testing of the algorithm in comparison to existing grids.

Requirements:

• Interest in 2D geometry and space-filling algorithms.
• Experience in web-programming.
• Ability to join on and extend previous work.

Details

Description

Virtual/Mixed Reality (VR) has been gaining popularity in the last years and we have seen that the future of these systems may have a very social factor to it. The most obvious social interaction may be in gaming, where multiple players can interact in the virtual world. However, collaboration and meetings in virtual reality may be another scenario that might even replace current tools such as videoconferencing.This project builds upon an ongoing one that looks into supporting interactions between a person in the virtual and the real world. The ongoing projects identifies designs and explores technical solutions for displaying real world user engagement in VR (i.e. someone enters the room, how can this be displayed to a person in VR?).

The goal of this project is to test methods for actively controlling user interactions. For example, once we have displayed in VR that a person has entered the room in the real world, how can the person in VR decide to engage with the person in the real world without taking the headset off.

Tasks

• Review of related work on privacy in virtual reality, gaze interaction and interaction in virtual reality and measuring HMD movements in VR
• Developing a prototype of a virtual reality environment that tests a number of designs for controlling user interactions (i.e. gaze, handheld controller)
• Implementing eye tracker data into VR
• Conducting an in-depth investigation of the potential and challenges of a virtual environment
• Analyze the data collected from the studies and build valid conclusions

Requirements

• Independent scientific work and creative problem solving
• Interest in performing user studies and experiments
• Interest in VR
• Good / Very good experience with c# 3D authoring tools (e.g.,Unity)

Details

While wearing a head mounted display in a collaborative task between a person acting in the real world and a person acting in the virtual world, the visual connection between the HMD user and the real world user is disrupted. But visual connection between two collaborators is important for at least five distinct communicative functions: regulating conversation flow, providing feedback, communicating emotional information, communicating the nature of interpersonal relationships and avoiding distraction by restricting visual input [1,2]. This work will focus on the aspect of providing feedback in a collaborative task. As real world studies show, the availability of eye gaze increase collaboration speed significantly. Also there is some work, that shows that this finding holds for virtual avatars [4], but there seams to be no added value by presenting a stereoscopic representation of the eyes [4]. Therefore the task for this work is to evaluate, if a display mounted on the front of a HMD will enhance the collaboration performance. Possible tasks to test this might be a selection task, at which the instructor wearing the HMD will speak out which object needs to be taken assisted by the eye gaze presented of the front of the HMD. Also it might be a possibility to directly measure the accuracy generated by the eye gaze as in [4]. The study will have a wizard of Oz design, as the eye movements will be precalculated. Therefore the technical implementation in this study will be to mount a display onto a HMD in a defined way and calibrate the displayed eye gaze on real world coordinates, based on the coordinates given by the head tracking system. The variables to be examined will be the kind of eye representation on the screen. 1. Real World Eyes, 2. Eyes on Display not moving/ head gaze to target, 3. Eyes on Display gazing at target/ no head movement 4. Eyes on Display gazing at target/ head movement.

[1]Argyle, M., Bodily Communication. Methuen & Co., London, 1975.
[2]Kendon, A. Some Functions of Gaze-Direction in Social Interaction. Acta Psychologica, 26 (1967), 22- 63.
[3]Sascha Fagel, Gérard Bailly, Frédéric Elisei, and Amélie Lelong. 2010. On the importance of eye gaze in a face-to-face collaborative task. In Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Affective interaction in natural environments (AFFINE '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 81-86. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1877826.1877847
[4]Norman Murray, Dave Roberts, Anthony Steed, Paul Sharkey, Paul Dickerson, and John Rae. 2007. An assessment of eye-gaze potential within immersive virtual environments. ACM Trans. Multimedia Comput. Commun. Appl. 3, 4, Article 8 (December 2007)

Aufgaben:

• Literaturrecherche verwandter Arbeiten
• Methodische Gliederung des Prozeßes
• Versuchsaufbau (Basierend auf Unity 5, HMD, Android)
• Versuchsdesign, Durchführung und Auswertung einer Probandenstudie zur Beantwortung der Forschungsfrage

Ihre Kompetenzen:

• Studium im Bereich Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion, Medientechnik, Informatik
• Interesse an selbstständigem wissenschaftlichem Arbeiten
• Erfahrung in Planung, Durchführung und statistischer Auswertung von Probandenstudien
• Grundlage in Unity (C#) und 3D-Modellierung

Details

If two people in one room (collocated) have to work together and one of them wears a head mounted display (HMD) like the Oculus Rift, they will experience the so called presence disparity. This border influences many aspect of collaboration like social awareness or deixis. One solution of overcoming breaks in the work flow of the participants is to augment the virtual world to let the virtual participant see his real world (RW) collaborator [1]. In our setup the RW and the HMD collaborator will meet at a multi touch tabletop display in order to collaborate. The Kinect (or similar RGB-D Sensor) will be above the Table in order to track the peoples movement. The VR user will see the hands of everybody reaching over the table, which might help to compensate the limitations in mutual awareness. Further the VR user will be able to see his own hands, when reaching over the table, what wil help him in the interaction with others. In this work you need to setup the tracking device (e.g. Kinect) above a touchtable. Further you need to integrate the point cloud rendering into Unity 5.x based on the tracking data of the tracking device, by the use of http://pointclouds.org/ or similar libraries. In the first user study you will have to assess the tracking accuracy of the system, when the virtual user is interacting with the touchsurface. Based on the results you will setup an experiment, that enables the users to collaborate in a puzzle task to asses the performance of the system compared to a real world baseline.
[1]Tang, A., Boyle, M. and Greenberg, S. (2005). Display and Presence Disparity in Mixed Presence Groupware. Journal of Research and Practice in Information Technology, Vol. 37, No. 2, May, p71-88.)

Aufgaben:

• Literaturrecherche verwandter Arbeiten
• Methodische Gliederung des Prozeßes
• Versuchsaufbau (Basierend auf Unity 5, HMD, Multi-Touch Tisch)
• Versuchsdesign, Durchführung und Auswertung einer Probandenstudie zur Beantwortung der Forschungsfrage

Ihre Kompetenzen:

• Studium im Bereich Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion, Medientechnik, Informatik
• Intereße an selbstständigem wißenschaftlichem Arbeiten
• Erfahrung in Planung, Durchführung und statistischer Auswertung von Probandenstudien
• Grundlage in Unity (C#) und 3D-Modellierung

Details

In order to develop, test or present simulated car functionalities without having a real car prototype, one needs to have an environment to drive in. However creating these environments is based on experts software, but the people interested in exploring the car functions are no experts in using those tools. What these people enjoy to do is to explore the possibilities of a car function in different environments they choose for themselves. As shown by the ideas of the google chrome racer ([1],[2]) a fun an collaborative way of creating those environments is to connect several private devices together to generate a big collaborative environment. The task is to elaborate about a framework, that enables several users to generate a street network in a collaborative manner, which will be rendered in Unity 5.x. The layout is defined by the ordering of sketches they made on their smartphones and then connecting this sketch to a road network. Further the users need to be enabled to add other environmental elements by sketching them on their Smartphone and adding them to a certain coordinate of the generated street network. A user study should show the advantages and disadvantages of the system in terms of promoting collaboration, usability, complexity of the results and ease of use in comparison to a pen and paper creation process.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOCM9_qGccY
[2]https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/casestudies/racer/

Aufgaben:

• Literaturrecherche verwandter Arbeiten
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• Methodische Gliederung des Prozeßes
• Versuchsaufbau (Basierend auf Unity 5, HMD, Multi-Touch Tisch)
• Methodische Gliederung des Prozeßes zum Wechsel der Position
• Versuchsaufbau (Basierend auf Unity 5/ Unreal, HMD, Multi-Touch Tisch)
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• Methodische Gliederung des Prozeßes zum Wechsel der Position
• Versuchsaufbau (Unity 5, Android, Surface Touch etc.)
• Versuchsdesign, Durchführung und Auswertung einer Probandenstudie zur Beantwortung der Forschungsfrage

Ihre Kompetenzen:

• Studium im Bereich Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion, Medientechnik, Informatik
• Interesse an selbstständigem wissenschaftlichem Arbeiten
• Erfahrung in Planung, Durchführung und statistischer Auswertung von Probandenstudien
• Grundlage in Unity (C#) und 3D-Modellierung

Details

The mounting of a leap motion to a head mounted display lets the user experience is own hands in a virtual environment. The tracking of the hand is very accurate, but there are always calibration mismatches between the users head position and the representation of his virtual hands. For example, if the users stands straight and is looking straight ahead onto the tracked, virtual hand in front of him. Then the real hand might be shifted slightly to the left or to the right. This error gets even bigger when the user keeps the hand in front of him and moves his head from left to right. This gets a problem, when the user wants to touch a virtual object, that has a real world representation. Then the users sees his hand touching the virtual object, but because of the shift he might miss to touch the real object. This work will focus on the calibration of the Leap Motion coordinate system to the HMD coordinate system based on the input of the touch surface. The calibration procedure will be based on the work of prior work. Your task is to implement the calibration procedure in Unity 5.x and evaluate the resulting accuracy of the system in an user study.

Aufgaben:

• Literaturrecherche verwandter Arbeiten
• Methodische Gliederung des Prozeßes
• Versuchsaufbau (Basierend auf Unity 5, HMD, Multi-Touch Tisch, Leap Motion)
• Versuchsdesign, Durchführung und Auswertung einer Probandenstudie zur Beantwortung der Forschungsfrage

Ihre Kompetenzen:

• Studium im Bereich Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion, Medientechnik, Informatik
• Interesse an selbstständigem wissenschaftlichem Arbeiten
• Erfahrung in Planung, Durchführung und statistischer Auswertung von Probandenstudien
• Grundlage in Unity (C#) und 3D-Modellierung

Details

Description

The design and evaluation of digital learning tools for preschoolers have unique requirements. For example, young children’s cognitive development dictates what they are capable of understanding and how they can interact with technologies. When designing for learning, learner’s goals, needs, activities and educational contexts must be additionally considered. Finally, when evaluating technologies with preschoolers, it must be noted that children can be shy, vary in their talkativeness, be biased in their responses to adults (wanting to please), have limited concentration, or have difficulty expressing themselves, all of which can influence usability testing outcomes.

This project aims to iteratively design and implement a digital learning tool for four- to six-year old children. The content of the tool will be based on the Control of Variables Strategy (CVS), which is foundational for school science and scientific literacy, but it does not routinely develop without practice or instruction. CVS is a strategy used to determine the effect of a particular variable; to manipulate that variable, but keep everything else the same (vary one thing at a time; VOTAT). As a result, one can distinguish between confounded and unconfounded experiments and draw valid inferences from experiments.

The project is a collaboration between the REASON Doctoral program at the Department of Psychology (LMU) and the Media Informatics Group (LMU). Usability testing of the tool will be conducted with children at local kindergartens.

Tasks

• Comprehensive survey of related work on interaction design for young children and existing products.
• Additional brief overview of cognitive development and scientific reasoning (specifically control of variables strategy).
• Design an interactive learning tool for preschool age children (4-6 years old) similar in concept to TED Tutor (see suggested readings below).
• Implement an Android/iOS/web app to run the learning tool on a tablet.
• Conduct (iterative) usability testing of the tool with children at kindergartens to refine design and implementation.
• Analyze the data collected from the studies and build valid conclusions.

Requirements

• Interest in an interdisciplinary study with a strong emphasis on technologies for learning sciences.
• Solid programming skills in a language/toolkit suitable for the implementation of a mobile app optimized to run on a tablet.
• Interest in designing a user interface for young children and refining it through usability testing.

Suggested Reading:

• Chen, Z., & Klahr, D. (1999). All other things being equal: acquisition and transfer of the control of variables strategy. Child Development, 70(5), 1098–1120.
• Gelderblom, H., & Kotze, P. (2008, October). Designing Technology for Young Children: What we can Learn from Theories of Cognitive Development. In Proceedings of the 2008 annual research conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists on IT research in developing countries: riding the wave of technology (pp. 66-75). ACM.
• Klahr, D. TED Tutor - Training in Experimental Design. see http://www.psy.cmu.edu/~tedtutor/index.html

Details

Maria Montessori developed different principles and methods to support a child develop his or her senses. One of those are sensory materials which allow experimentation and self organized learning about differences and relationships of dimensions, shapes or sound qualities. All of those methods are focused on real world objects but don't include stimuli originate in the digital world. To help internalizing such omnipresent stimuli, we want to expand Montessori's methods by today's technology. The goal of this thesis is to augment classic sensorial materials to enable children experience digital/electronic sound and learn about qualities of tone and pitch.

Tasks:

• Adapting Montessori's educational methods to digital stimuli.
• Prototyping an interface combining sensorial materials and digitally created sounds.
• Evaluation with children aged 5 to 6.

Requirements:

• Social skills and experience in handling kids.
• Experience in programming and prototyping (Arduino, soldering, electronics, ...).
• Interest for and understanding of sound and synthesis techniques.

Suggested Reading:

• Maria Montessori's Sensorial Materials
• Sievers, B. A young person's guide to the principles of music synthesis. Dostupné z: http://beausievers.com/synth/synthbasics.

Details

Generative music systems are becoming more and more relevant nowadays. In the near future Artificial Intelligences will become evenly equal partners in music making scenarios. Therefore we have to find ways to interact with systems that are able to make their own decisions and have their own creative mind. Established communication with human musicians are eye-contact, gestures, verbal expressions.How can we communicate with digital musicians, how can they communicate with humans?

Tasks:

• Development of interaction concepts for the handling of AI/generative systems in a musical context.
• Implementation of a functional prototype that demonstrates the basic concept.
• Conducting a study with students.

Requirements:

• Interest and experience in music theory.
• Experience in programming and hardware-prototyping.
• Ambition to delve into hardware and software.

Suggested Reading:

• Yamaha Artificial Intelligence (AI) Transforms a Dancer into a Pianist
• Mateas, M. (2001). Expressive AI: A hybrid art and science practice. Leonardo, 34(2), 147-153.
• De Mantaras, R. L., & Arcos, J. L. (2002). AI and music: From composition to expressive performance. AI magazine, 23(3), 43.

Details

Imitation is a basic principle in human learning. By observation we can detect principles and schemes one can later apply, reproduce and internalize. Most modern interfaces offer a single input method (e.g touch) to interact with those, independent from application or task. Differentiability therefore can become complex. In this thesis we want to investigate possible advantages of holding information in working memory, when interface's modality is represented by shape.

Tasks:

• Defining a solid study design by conducting pilot-studies helping to refine processes and observation plans.
• Implementation of tools needed for conducting the study.
• Execution of the study with children and students as subjects.

Requirements:

• Social skills and experience in handling kids.
• Experience in programming.
• Ability to join on and extend previous work.

Details

Collaboration is an essential part in music making. During collaboration soft skills as well as understanding for musical synergies are trained. Therefore we want to develop interfaces enable children to collaborate in music making. To motivate children in music making we have to develop concepts incorporating playful ideas, easy tasks and expressive outcomes. These aspects are important factors in a successful user experience. 

Tasks:

• UX research with children.
• Concept development and prototype implementation.
• Evaluation with children.

Requirements:

• Social skills and experience in handling kids.
• Experience in programming and prototyping (tools of your choice).
• Interest for and understanding of music theory.

Suggested Reading:

• Blaine, T., & Fels, S. (2003, May). Contexts of collaborative musical experiences. In Proceedings of the 2003 conference on New interfaces for musical expression (pp. 129-134). National University of Singapore.

Details

In the last years the trend to hardware use in music production continued. More and more users are deciding to choose hardware synthesizers, effects, etc. to enhance their production workflow. A growing group of electronic musicians even focusses on music performance without using computers. What are reasons for those tendencies? What are limiting factors of both approaches? How can we design interfaces to satisfy passionated hardware users as well as dedicated software enthusiasts? 

Tasks:

• UX research with music software user groups.
• UX research with hardware oriented musicians.
• Concept development based on the revealed insights.
• Prototyping the developed concept.

Requirements:

• Experience in UX research methods.
• Background in electronic music production and music theory.
• Ambition in realizing conceptual ideas.

Suggested Reading:

• Lazar, J., Feng, J. H., & Hochheiser, H. (2017). Research methods in human-computer interaction. Morgan Kaufmann.
• Russ, J. (2014). Longterm UX für Musikinstrumente-Research mit Nutzern von Kreativsoftware und Hardware am Beispiel von Ableton Live und Push. UP14-Vorträge.

Details

In a composite business environment, various people collect all sorts of qualitative feedback from customers as well as users in an unstructured way (e.g. product managers, technical presales, sales). The collected feedback differs from insights gathered through quantitative methods, as it is rich of valuable and personal needs, struggles and other stories.

We need you to design, (partly) implement, and test your ideas for the collaborative analysis of qualitative data, the sharing of higher-level insights and creation of larger user stories. Concepts such as ‘playful tagging’ could be used to encourage platform users to help structure the data.

Your work consists in…

• Conducting a survey of related work in areas such as collaborative qualitative analysis and UX tools
• Analyzing the problem, creating concepts for solutions, prototyping, testing your ideas
• Implementing your ideas into an existing nodeJS-, ReactJS-, mongoDB-based prototype
• Analyzing real qualitative data

You need…

• Basic knowledge of Javascript as you need to work with nodeJS-, ReactJS-, mongoDB
• Basic knowledge of prototyping tools (e.g. Axure, Adobe Experience) to express your ideas and concepts
• (Optional) experience in evaluating qualitative data

About us

You will be joining the UX team of the Fujitsu Enabling Software Technology GmbH under the responsibility of Dr. Sarah Tausch and Dr. Julie Wagner. Both have worked at the Media Informatics and Human-Computer Interaction Groups of the Department of Informatics of the University of Munich: Dr. Sarah Tausch is a former doctoral student of Prof. Heinrich Hussmann and achieved her PhD in 2016. Dr. Julie Wagner is a former PostDoc at the group of Prof. Andreas Butz. Both collaborated on qualitative analysis topics during their time at LMU. Today, they are both passionate UX researchers at Fujitsu. They understand the balancing act of writing a thesis split between university and industry and will guide you to a thesis with both research value and gain for the industry.

Details

Details

Description

How can driver’s stress be automatically recognised? What can be done in the car to reduce driver’s stress?

Based on previous research results, you will develop a method to automatically recognise driver’s stress, e.g. by using for example wearables, EDA, or eye tracking. Furthermore, you will suggest measures to reduce driver’s stress, e.g. putting on the driver’s favourite playlist or suggesting another route, and implement them in the car (wizard-of-oz approach is possible). Afterwards, you will conduct an extensive user study in an advanced driving simulator at an automobile manufacturer to evaluate your techniques and measures. You will collaborate closely with a Psychology thesis student, sharing the tasks mentioned above.

Tasks

• Literature research regarding stress, recognising emotions (in cars), and stress-reducing measures
• Develop a method to automatically recognise driver’s stress
• Suggest and implement (wizard-of-oz) measures to reduce stress in the car
• Conduct a user study in a driving simulator (in cooperation with psychologist)
• Evaluate your work based on the results

Minimum requirements

• Interest in personalisation and car context
• Previous experience with emotion recognition or highly motivated to familiarise yourself with the topic
• You like to work in teams and are able to communicate interdisciplinary

Starting date

March, 2018
Details

Description

How can personalised car interfaces be design intelligibly?

Systems with complex personalisation algorithms are always difficult to understand for the user, leading to inaccurate mental models. However, an adequate mental model is important to increase user’s acceptance and trust in the system. Explaining complex personalisation models is even more difficult in the car where display space and cognition time are limited. Your task will be to develop an intelligible user interface for the car which depicts the driver’s current state (e.g. stressed) and explains adaptive measures in the car. Afterwards, you will conduct an extensive user study in an advanced driving simulator at an automobile manufacturer to evaluate your prototype. You will collaborate closely with two other thesis students from psychology and computer science.

Tasks

• Literature research regarding driver state, adaptive user interfaces, intelligibility of complex systems
• Develop a prototype of an in-car user interface which explains personalisation algorithms in an iterative design process
• Conduct a user study in a driving simulator (with two other students)
• Give recommendations based on your results

Minimum requirements

• Interested in personalisation and car context
• Previous experience in developing prototypes
• Previous experience with conducting user studies
• You like to work in teams and are able to communicate interdisciplinary

Starting date

March, 2018
Details

Description

Developing an Android app for predicting personality traits via smartphone usage

In the PhoneStudy project, an interdisciplinary team consisting of psychologists, statisticians, and computer scientists develop an Android app, which tracks and logs the user’s smartphone behaviour to predict personality traits. For example, we track the number of users’ calls, sms, and app usage, which might predict how extraverted the user is. The app will be distributed among participants in spring 2018, which will then use the app for several months. There are several tasks for media informatics students in this project (cf. below), from which you can choose. Please contact me when you are interested in the project and will give you more details.

Tasks

You can choose between different tasks:

• Configuring and working on the server, its scalability and stability, as well as the data base (MariaDB)
• Working on the internal web based front end of the server, which depicts the current status of participants and logged data
• Further develop the app: integrating new features and fixing current bug
• Quality management: Developing automatic testing scripts

Minimum requirements

• Interested in interdisciplinary projects
• High communication skills, especially willing to communicate interdisciplinary
• Able to work independently
• Previous experience with server configuration, (Android) app development, web development, data bases (depending on the chosen task)
• High frustration tolerance

Details

Earliest start date:

May 1st, 2018

Description

Conduct extensive user tests to evaluate an interdisciplinary research app.

In the PhoneStudy project, an interdisciplinary team consisting of psychologists, statisticians, and computer scientists has developed an Android app, which tracks and logs the user’s smartphone behaviour to predict personality traits. For example, we track the number of users’ calls, sms, and app usage, which might predict how extraverted the user is. The app will be distributed among approx. 800 participants in fall 2018, which will then use the app for several weeks.
To ensure the functionality of the app, you will conduct extensive user tests. Therefore, you will have to develop a guideline for the user tests in a first step. The great challenge here is to check the validity of the data and recognize participants' problems while using the app at home. Afterwards, you will recruit approximately 20 participants, who will use the app for one week. Based on your guideline, you conduct user tests and post interviews with participants to examine current problems, invalid data or incomprehensibilities. Eventually, you give recommendations for improvement of the app.

Tasks

• Develop a guideline for the user tests
• Recruit participants, who are willing to use the app
• Conduct user tests and interviews with participants to evaluate the app
• Based on your findings, give recommendations for improvement

Minimum requirements

• High communication skills and willingness to work in an interdisciplinary projects
• Previous experience with conducting user tests and interviews
• Optional: Previous experience with app development

Details

Description

Developing a website for an interdisciplinary research project, allowing participants to understand the aim of the study and to easily participate in it.

In the PhoneStudy project, an interdisciplinary team consisting of psychologists, statisticians, and computer scientists has developed an Android app, which tracks and logs the user’s smartphone behaviour to predict personality traits. For example, we track the number of users’ calls, sms, and app usage, which might predict how extraverted the user is. The app will be distributed among approx. 800 participants in fall 2018, which will then use the app for several weeks.
In a previous study, the on-boarding process to ensure an ethically approved and anonymous yet easy participation in the study was very difficult. Thus, we want to develop a website which explains participants the aim of the study, how to use the App and provide personalized details for the participants (e.g. provide an anonymous user ID). A design student can provide you with suitable graphics and images.

Tasks

• Define requirements for the Website by interviewing the project partners (psychologists and computer scientists)
• Implement a first prototype of the website, which is connected to the already existing server
• Evaluate the suitability of your prototype by conducting user tests with prospective PhoneStudy participants

Minimum requirements

• High communication skills and willingness to work in an interdisciplinary projects
• Previous experience with website development and design
• Optional: Previous experience with conducting user tests

Details

Description

In which situations do drivers perceive high arousal (stress)?
How does stress manifest itself in driver behavior and performance?
What can we do to reduce driver's stress?
Does the personality trait neuroticism influence feeling and coping with stress?

Based on extensive literature research and previous results from a qualitative Bachelor's thesis, you will be asked to develop an online questionnaire. Afterwards, you will distribute the questionnaire. To be able to investigate personality traits, you will have to acquire at least 300 participants. Afterwards, you will analyze the data with inferential statistics using R or SPSS. Based on your findings, you will give recommendations for an adaptive car interface.

Tasks

• Literature research regarding driver’s stress
• Develop an online questionnaire
• Recruit participants for the online survey (at least 300)
• Analyze the data using inferential statistics
• Give recommendations for adaptive car interfaces

Minimum requirements

• Interested in personalization and the car context
• Previous experience in conducting user studies
• Previous experience with inferential statistical analysis and evaluating in R or SPSS or high willingness to familiarize yourself with the topic
• Sociable personality and/or highly motivated to distribute the online questionnaire among 300 participants

Details

Grundidee des Forschungsprojektes Providentia (www.testfeld-a9.de) ist es, hochautomatisierten Fahrzeugen einen möglichst umfassenden Vorausblick über die fahrzeugeigene Sensorik hinaus zu ermöglichen. Dafür wird aus dem komplexen Abbild der Umwelt mit Hilfe von Sensorik an der Fahrbahn (z.B. Kameras, Radar) und mit Sensorik in vernetzten Fahrzeugen (z.B. Kameras, Lidar) ein „digitaler Zwilling“ des Verkehrsgeschehens in Echtzeit erzeugt. Dieser wird maschinenlesbar über ein verbindendes 5G-Mobilfunknetz zur Verfügung gestellt und ermöglicht es hochautomatisierten Fahrzeugen Entscheidungen auf Basis umfassender Informationen zu fällen. Verdeckungen von Verkehrsteilnehmern werden aufgelöst, Messunsicherheiten verringert und ein kilometerweiter Vorausblick des Verkehrsgeschehens zur Verfügung gestellt. Damit ist die Grundlage für ein sicheres, vollautonomes und ökonomisch sinnvolles Fahrzeugverhalten gegeben. So liefern wir einen wesentlichen Beitrag für die Steuerung hochautomatisierter Fahrzeuge, für die Verbesserung des Verkehrsflusses und der Verkehrssicherheit.

Aufgaben:

• Eigenständiges Arbeiten an einem interessanten Forschungsprojekt
• Anpassung und Implementation der Simulationsumgebung in Carmaker
• Weiterentwicklung des Algorithmus zur Visualisierung der Echtzeitdaten in Camaker

Ihre Kompetenzen:

• Studium im Bereich Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion, Medientechnik, Informatik
• Interesse an selbständigem wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten
• Gute Programmierkenntnisse in C++
• Idealerweise Kenntnisse in ROS und Linux

Details

Grundidee des Forschungsprojektes Providentia (www.testfeld-a9.de) ist es, hochautomatisierten Fahrzeugen einen möglichst umfassenden Vorausblick über die fahrzeugeigene Sensorik hinaus zu ermöglichen. Dafür wird aus dem komplexen Abbild der Umwelt mit Hilfe von Sensorik an der Fahrbahn (z.B. Kameras, Radar) und mit Sensorik in vernetzten Fahrzeugen (z.B. Kameras, Lidar) ein „digitaler Zwilling“ des Verkehrsgeschehens in Echtzeit erzeugt. Dieser wird maschinenlesbar über ein verbindendes 5G-Mobilfunknetz zur Verfügung gestellt und ermöglicht es hochautomatisierten Fahrzeugen Entscheidungen auf Basis umfassender Informationen zu fällen. Verdeckungen von Verkehrsteilnehmern werden aufgelöst, Messunsicherheiten verringert und ein kilometerweiter Vorausblick des Verkehrsgeschehens zur Verfügung gestellt. Damit ist die Grundlage für ein sicheres, vollautonomes und ökonomisch sinnvolles Fahrzeugverhalten gegeben. So liefern wir einen wesentlichen Beitrag für die Steuerung hochautomatisierter Fahrzeuge, für die Verbesserung des Verkehrsflusses und der Verkehrssicherheit.

Aufgaben:

• Versuchsaufbau (Basierend auf Unity)
• Aufbau der Simulationsumgebung des digitalen Abbilds der Autobahn in Unity

Ihre Kompetenzen:

• Studium im Bereich Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion, Medientechnik, Informatik oder ähnliches
• Interesse an selbständigem wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten
• Gute Kenntnisse in Unity

Details